Check out my first book, Any Other Night, currently posted in its entirety on Wattpad.com. You can read the book for free there if you’d like!

Just to show you how awesome the folks at Wattpad are, they approached me last fall to say they wanted to feature my book. Since then, I’ve had over 300,000 reads and get an average of 40 to 50 unique readers per day. I’ve been so happy with the comments and responses of My Wattpad readers:

“I loved this book and could not put it down.”

“OMG this book was so good.… Thank you so much for this wonderful story.”

“I’m in love with this book….Started at four and just finished it… Think I’ll go and reread it. It’s too awesome to let go…”

Thank you, Wattpad readers, for being the best fans a writer could ever have! I even wrote a guest post about my experience for www.janefriedman.com. Have a look here.

As the author of three indie novels, I was looking for ways to expand my base of readers. This blog’s very own Jane Friedman suggested that I try Wattpad, an online writing community where authors post their work for free. In April 2014, the site reported 35 million unique visitors per month, which is a lot of exposure for one little indie book, if you can get people to find it. The problem is, they also have over 1,000 story uploads per day, so the fight for reader attention is fierce.

In June 2014, I posted a portion of Any Other Night, a YA coming-of-age novel that I’d published in 2011. Then I waited.

To be perfectly honest, nothing much happened. That is, until August, when I was contacted by a content specialist from Wattpad.

I’m guest posting about my experience on Wattpad at Jane Friedman’s today. Click over to read the rest.

Piper Crenshaw is a fifteen year old girl with zits, a boy-that’s-a-friend who she wishes were a boyfriend, and a pack of mean-girl bullies on her case. Piper is completely ordinary.

Except for the fact that her mother killed a man and hid his body in their house. And the fact that their house is haunted.

In fact, Piper’s house is almost a character in this creepy, thrill-filled contemporary horror story. It alternates between protecting and terrorizing Piper, sometimes locking her in, other times beating up the bullies in her life. It features stairs that lead nowhere and steaming pools of blood. In this house, the past and the present, the ordinary and the bizarre, all exist side-by-side.

Piper has been raised to accept her situation and not ask questions. Tired of passively taking what comes her way, she starts to investigate. She slowly learns that she and her family are trapped for all of eternity in the hundred year-old scheme of a madman, and she is the only one who can save them.

Author Cortney Pearson has pulled out all the stops in PHOBIC, her first novel. Piper’s high school life (including her hot potential boyfriend) are just as fully realized as the demonic history of her home and family. The story goes back and forth effortlessly between the normal and the twisted, the sane and the lunatic, the expected and the unthinkable.

I read this book fast, with a pumping heart. Expect cliff hangers and cold chills. Don’t expect to get much sleep! Highly recommended.

Men, don’t read this column. Your ego will never recover. Because this, guys, is what women really want – the romantic hero in all those books that clog the bestseller lists these days. I will call him Raoul. He, this, is what every woman wants. And here’s how you spell it:P is for pecs. Raoul has them. He also has abs, delts, biceps, triceps, traps, glutes, and even muscles that other men don’t have at all, like claps and flutes. Every muscle in his body is exquisitely chiseled. He is breathtaking from every angle. He is a paragon of strength, yet sensitivity. He can benchpress a woman with one hand and turn her on while doing it. Raoul is an unparalleled living sculpture of male beauty. When women see him, they stop in their tracks, their mouths fall open, they get wet in their most personal areas. In short, guys, he’s not you.E is for expert. In bed that is. The romantic hero has made love to 1, 242 women in 267 different sexual positions. He has personally caused 3, 746,291 orgasms. And that was all last week. He knows what a woman is feeling down to the depths of her very core. He can sense exactly where she is at every second, knows just how to bring her to the brink of ecstasy, then keep her there for hours, mewling and squealing, begging “Please, master, let me come!” (Oh, wait, that last part’s just in the BDSM books, but then, they’re 42% of the market.) That’s right, guys. Once again, this man is not you.R is for rod. Yep. His manly parts get their own letter. In fact, they’re so big, they get their own zip code. Think a baseball bat and two bowling balls. Think a rocket missile and two nuclear-generated geodesic domes. His equipment is velvet over steel, silky smoothness over pulsing, rock-hard manhood. It fills a woman, feels soooo good, stays erect for days. Because this is a family column, I won’t describe the parts of his parts, the exciting differences between the mid-field versus the end zone, for example. I won’t describe how his parts function, e.g. the fountain of fireworks at the climactic end. I’ll leave that to the novels to do, in glowing detail. But sorry guys. Those parts aren’t yours.F is for first. Despite his wordliness and oodles of sexual experience, he is flabbergasted to find himself doing things with his heroine (I’ll call her Clarissa) for the first time in his life. He’s never brought a woman to his home… before Clarissa. Or, he’s never brought a woman into his bedroom… before Clarissa. He has always reserved sex for special chambers filled with straps and floggers, or for impersonal hotel rooms . Clarissa is the first to enter his private spaces. He has always just f***ed women. With Clarissa, he makes love for the first time. She is the first woman to meet his family, to take care of his dog when he leaves town. She is the first woman he spends the night with; all the others he left after the sex was over. Clarissa is the first for everything that matters because, to him, she is… special.E is for excellent. Raoul is excellent at everything he does. This means not just love making. First and foremost, he is a superb cook. This is a strict requirement. Every romantic hero can cook, and does so for his Clarissa at drop of a spatula. (Note: she is the first woman he has ever cooked for.) He loves to do this, particularly after ten hours at the office followed by four hours of hot sex. That’s just the time to bound up from bed and announce, “Let me make pasta alfredo! With chocolate covered strawberries for dessert!” He then proceeds to do so wrapped in nothing but a towel. In addition to cooking, Raoul is expert at whatever else is required by that minimal slice of plot not occupied by sex and romance. He can fly planes and helicopters, ski steep mountain faces, charm a girl’s family, negotiate a billion dollar deal, navigate the Amazon in a canoe, and take down any man standing in a fist fight. And he does it all while remaining faithful to Clarissa, the only woman who has ever captured his heart. Because she is… special. Ask yourself, boys. Is that you?C is for cocky. Raoul is arrogant, but in an adorable way. He knows how hot he is and teases Clarissa with his hotness. He takes off his shirt a lot. He stands one inch away from her, making her squirm with desire, but refusing to satisfy her. Not yet. “I will not kiss you tonight,” he announces. Clarissa—and the reader—must wait thirty agonizing pages before he finally gets around to it. But the wait is worth it, because he’s THAT GOOD. And Raoul knows it. Not you. Sorry.T is for thumbs. In the same way that thumbs distinguish man from the animals, thumbs distinguish the romantic hero from other men. The word “graze” comes up a lot. Raoul like to graze his thumb along Clarissa’s lower lip, the edge of her jaw, the side of her breast. In countless books, Raoul can stimulate a woman to orgasm with his thumb, while two or three of his fingers explore in the neighborhood. This is all on one hand, mind you, while his other hand plays love songs on the guitar. So what ‘s that spell? P-E-R-F-E-C-T. That, my friends, is the woman’s romantic hero. And, sorry, men. It’s not you.

My years as a writer have probably taught me a thousand and six things, but here are just six. They are the ones that came instantly to mind when I set about to write this, and they’re presented in the order I thought of them. So here goes: 1. Find a writing mentor. A really good one will save your life. This is someone – a writing teacher, free lance editor, astute beta reader, or writing partner — who believes in you, wants you to succeed, and can advise you in a way that brings your writing up to its highest level. This person will tell you when a scene feels rushed, when a character isn’t believable, when a joke isn’t funny, and will also tell you everything that’s working and give you strokes for it. Writers spend a lot of time alone, and we need both the strokes and the reality checks. 2. Beware of brutal honesty. Think twice about the critiquer or writing teacher who professes to “brutal honesty,” making it sound as if that’s a good thing. It may not be. There’s a certain kind of critique – the angry kind based more on the reviewer’s own agenda than on your work— that can send you crawling, bleeding and battered, back to actuarial school. At this point, I should be clear. I’m not talking about the editor who says “your main character is unsympathetic and here’s why.” That person is trying to help you, and in fact most people you’ll encounter in this field are. I’m talking about the rare person who says, “Why don’t you just kill off your protagonist in the first ten pages and put the reader out of his misery?” This, you don’t need. Flee from this person. Seek out kind, constructive honesty. Someone with your best interests at heart can deliver the news about that failed chapter in a way that leaves you hopeful and full of ideas for the rewrite. That’s the kind of person whose feedback you want. 3. Make a great setting central to your book. What better way to enrich a book than through a beautiful, interesting setting? Better still, make the setting almost a character in the story, or so integral to the storyline that it’s hard to imagine ever setting the action anywhere else. This gives your book an extra depth. It also doesn’t hurt to choose a place that you yourself would like to visit. You will be forced to do research. How can you describe your character’s life in the Amazon rainforest unless you’ve been there yourself? It’s fun to travel for research, and you may be able to deduct your travel as a business expense. 4. Write in scenes. Think like a screenwriter. A movie goes from scene to scene, and your book should, too. In each scene, you use dialog, characters, setting, and action to move the story forward a step or two. So long as the scenes progress logically, you don’t need to worry about transitions. Just end the scene, and start the next one. 5. Seek out both company and exercise. Writing is all about being sedentary and alone. It can turn you into a real lump. Get out into the world and talk to someone — every day. Take a walk or go to the gym – every day. 6. Enjoy your journey—on your terms. You have to, because the journey is long. And the rewards are uncertain, at best. Writers often talk about how hard it is to write, but for me the bottom line is: only do it if you enjoy it or it fills a need. I write things that I love, and I’m proud of the books I write. That feeling of accomplishment gets me through the setbacks and disappointments. It carries me on to the next book, so I can once again create something that, to me at least, is meaningful and beautiful. No matter how much I may mess up in other areas, I try to offer the world the best part of me through my books. And doing that makes me happy.

Whether you like revising or hate it, we all gotta do it if we want to call ourselves professional writers. But how to do it in a way that really improves our work? Here are two tips that I’ve come up with that have helped me a lot:Pull out a thread in the story and evaluate it by itself. Your thread might relate to a character or a recurring subject in your book. Example: you have a secondary character named Jerome who is supposed to go through a transformation during the novel. Put on your “find” function in Word and pick out every mention or scene relating to Jerome. Cut and paste them in the order they appear in the book, then print. Eh, voila! You’ve got the entire Jerome story, in order, in one place. Take note of what pages each scene appears on. Does Jerome disappear for fifty pages, causing readers to forget about him for a time? Maybe you need to insert another scene, or should relocate some existing scenes. Does Jerome progress as a character? Is the progression believable and satisfying? Are there gaps or inconsistencies? It’s a lot easier to answer these questions when the Jerome scenes are all together in one place. In addition to characters, you can do this with an action subplot, a theme, a story element, or anything else in your novel that you need to keep track of. Use a word cloud to cull out repetition. Ever heard of www.wordle.com? Just cut and paste the body of your manuscript into their window and they’ll create a “word cloud” from it. The cloud contains all the most commonly used words in your manuscript in varying sizes, depending on how many times the word appears. Here’s an example of what a word cloud looks like.

In your own word cloud, the really huge words will probably be the main characters’ names. After that come those words that you use with embarrassing frequency—words like just, around, looked, like. At least , those are the words that loomed large in the word cloud for my latest manuscript, Undercover Hamster. I was surprised to learn that my characters looked around at any opportunity, for any reason, and often for no reason. It was like a tic I had inflicted on my characters, human and rodent alike. I deleted a lot of those pesky items and wracked my brain for replacements. So, if you don’t want the word just to appear seventy-five times in your book, once again use your “find” function to go through your manuscript deciding which justs shall live and which shall be replaced with other choices. You’d be amazed how often replacing the word isn’t even called for—you can just delete it! That kind of pruning and shaping can really give life to a manuscript. These ideas have worked well for me. Give them a try!

Really good advice is hard to come by. In fact, most advice I flee from. But I recently found two nuggets of wisdom–unrelated except that they both pertained to writers—that have helped me a lot. I hereby offer them to you.Maintain an excellent, professional website closely geared to its target audience. This advice may seem self-evident, but I, for one, wasn’t following it. It came from Josh Adams of Adams Literary in a talk I heard recently. Josh said to think about who the audience is for your website or blog. If you’re an unknown writer looking to win a traditional publishing deal, your website/blog audience is agents and editors. And if you’re sending out queries and submitting work for publication, agents and editors will visit your website. Guaranteed. Therefore, your website and/or blog should be designed to impress those people only. Not your future readers, who might be fifth graders or hopeless romantics. And not your friends, with whom you gossip and bemoan all your little setbacks in life. So no cupids and hearts, and no sad posts about your many rejections. Your website should be professional and convince an agent or editor that you’re someone they want to work with.Also, to state the obvious, your website should exist. At the time I heard Josh’s speech, my own website had crashed and burned, and I’d never gotten around to reinstating it. Boy, did I get religion fast. I should mention that I’m the author of three self-published books, but am now thinking of finding an agent for my fourth. I put together the most professional-looking website I could manage and studded it with anything I thought an agent or editor would want to know about me.And guess what? Last week I got a call from an agent I’d never met. She had seen my name somewhere, read my website, and asked if I was working on anything new. As a matter of fact, I was! I got a request for the full manuscript. So, thank you, Josh Adams, for advancing my career when you don’t even represent me. Now that’s a good agent!When writing the opening sentence of your novel, remember: “Action in books for the young must start before the opening line.” This advice is from the wonderful children’s book writer, Richard Peck. I came across it in a January/February 2014 SCBWI magazine article titled “First Impressions” by Kim Tomsic. Peck made the statement in connection with children’s books, but I would use it to start even a cook book, or a book about navigational systems in ocean liners. I repeat: Action in books for the young must start before the opening line. In other words, your opening line should describe an action that has already taken place. Peck used this technique in his book THE TEACHER’S FUNERAL: “If your teacher has to die, August isn’t a bad time of the year for it.” Another example, from ALMOST MOON by Alice Sebold: “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” And from CRANK by Ellen Hopkins: “Life was good before I met the monster.” This technique drops your reader into the middle of a river that is already rushing along, which gives the opening sentence tension and immediacy. I realized that I had stumbled onto this approach by dumb luck in my latest work-in-progress, called UNDERCOVER HAMSTER. My story starts: “The humans thought they had locked me in.” In all these examples, the action starts before the opening sentence. These ideas are practical and concrete; they are something you can actually do. Try ’em. They work.